As with most projects involving the Pet Shop Boys, this book started out with little formal brief, other than to be a combination of photographs and text recording their 1991 American tour as it traveled across fourteen cities in the USA and Canada. If there was a single idea behind it, it was one of what might happen when two very different cultures - that of the Pet Shop Boys and that of America - met. The choice of Penny Smith as the tour

photographer was influenced by her classic photographs of the Clash at American truck stops and there was certainly an expectation that she might photograph Neil and Chris against the wide open landscapes of mid-America, or leaning casually against gas pumps. If she didn't take those photos, it was because they were not there to be taken. Even in America the Pet Shop Boys were not, it turned out, the sort of people who spent very much time in fields or at gas stations.

What we recorded was rather more complicated. The Pet Shop Boys treat America with an uneasy mixture of priorities and prejudices. It is a country they face both with a sense of mission and with a sense of disdain. The same conundrum would restate itself time and again during the tour - what does it mean if they want success here but dislike so much of what modern America, and the modern American, is?

One solution - a rationalization that proud Englishmen abroad have used for generations - was to convince themselves that the Americans to whom the Pet Shop Boys appealed were somehow special. They were the disenchanted! The outcasts! The cheesed-off! In other words, they were precisely those Americans who saw in America from within the same faults the Pet Shop Boys saw from the outside. It was a good answer, and there was some truth in it, but it was never going to be the whole story.

The Pet Shop Boys had never toured in America before. In 1986 they planned to - tickets even went on sale in Los Angeles - but they pulled out when they realized how much money they would lose. A couple of years later, after the release of their Introspective album, they were persuaded by their American record company, EMI, that it would help their credibility with an American audience if they toured, and a private agreement was drawn up between EMI and the Pet Shop Boys whereby they would perform in at least twelve cities following the release of their next album. In 1991 Neil and Chris decided that, even though that agreement had been superseded,

and even though they would still lose a large sum of money taking such an elaborate production around American theaters, they wished to undertake such a tour anyway. Nevertheless, the whole style of the show was based on a reaction to America. They had been told that you couldn't tour America successfully without a live drummer, advice which aggravated them: their response was to have no musicians on-stage whatsoever, and the theatrical nature of the performance followed from this decision. It was a typical example of the way they work: they would tour America but they wouldn't give an inch.

The spring of 1991 found them at a strange moment. Their latest album, Behavior; had been widely proclaimed a masterpiece but had still sold less well than their previous records. Just before the tour a single, 'Being Boring', one of the songs they were most proud of, became their least successful single in the British charts for six years, a failure which they struggled to explain to themselves. These few months caught them by turns battling with and dismissing an unusual level of self-doubt. Often they would toy with the idea of stopping what they were doing less, I felt, because they were genuinely considering disbanding than because raising the question reminded them why they wanted to be a pop group, and helped remind them which things they should do, and which they should not. These matters were thrown more keenly into focus by being in America - there is nowhere else where success is valued so highly, or where the decisions and sacrifices you make in chasing success are more nakedly apparent. Their American career started well - in 1986 'West End Girls' reached number one and was followed by a string of hit singles - but recently it had tailed off, a

nd the effort required to reverse that had sometimes seemed unachievable. Their feelings about this would swing from hour to hour, from being annoyed that the largest nation of pop listeners were stubbornly resisting them to being arrogantly dismissive of anyone silly enough not to like them, to having the detached pride of those whose creative accomplishments are sufficient satisfaction in themselves, to being studiously determined to woo new converts, to keenly wanting not to even be seen to be trying to be liked. Part of this book is indeed about the Pet Shop Boys versus America, but in other parts America sits in the background and the true tussle is that of the Pet Shop Boys versus themselves.

One of the conceits of the previous Pet Shop Boys book, Pet Shop Boy &, Literally, was that it treated a pop music tour as though it were the subject of social anthropology, and thus the text was ritualistically inclusive in its detail, and virtually no events of even the most mundane significance were omitted. Though scenes in this new book are often presented in the same detail, the overall text is not inclusive in the same way The narration, just as the photographs, takes the form of snapshots. The reader is eavesdropping, and most of the time those speaking have forgotten they are being listened to.

In hindsight, Neil and Chris remember this tour as thrilling and fairly triumphant. Their memories may be unfairly skewed towards the happier times; this book, by contrast, is unfairly skewed towards the more difficult moments. The Pet Shop Boys are not the sort of people to say a huge amount during moments of exuberance, preferring to sip a little champagne, perhaps, and then move on. At times of boredom, irritation or crisis they are rather more garrulous. If in the text that follows they occasionally seem irrational, or inconsistent, or pompous, or nasty remember that most of the words in this book aren't those of public statements but of private, everyday babble; words that, in more normal circumstances, would have been forgotten as soon as they were spoken.